Should women go to jail? “I never really thought about that.” I’ve been saying this all along: Once abortion opponents understand that you can’t have a different legal standard for women who have abortions, they will lose their taste for making it a crime.
Bad news! A lady was raped. Good news! She went to the hospital, was cared for, and was given two birth control pills to prevent pregnancy. Bad news! The lady was arrested by the Tampa PD on a warrant when filing her police report. Good news! Er, hmmm. Bad news! Prison employee Michele Spinelli refused to give the lady her second pill, on “religious grounds.” Good news! The lady did not get pregnant anyway. Bad news! We will just repeat that again: Prison employee Michele Spinelli refused to give the lady her second pill, on “religious grounds.”
Good news! A US District Court judge says the lady can indeed sue Spinelli. Bad news! But not the sheriff who was supposed to oversee the jail. Good news! Florida has a “conscience clause” stating that any pharmacist or doctor cannot be held liable for refusing to fork over your slut pills. Oh wait, that is bad news. This story kind of sucks! Bad news! Even the judge allowing the lawsuit to go forward refers to the morning after pill as “terminating a pregnancy” instead of “keeping a pregnancy from occurring.” Bad news! Just like they took over the schoolboards in the ’80s, the Christian Right has had a long-term goal of practically preventing women from getting birth control by stacking the pharmaceutical colleges and getting conscience clauses passed throughout the nation. Bad news! Some counties only have one pharmacist, and she is Michele Spinelli.
To this sort of Christian, anything that neutralizes their religious standards in the public arena is actually persecution. They believe religious “freedom” means the religious majority should dictate the rules, and anyone who tries to say differently is attacking their faith.
Here’s a perfect example, via Slacktivist:
The Voss Lighting Company of Lincoln, Neb., doesn’t hide its religious light under a barrel.
“Our biblical mission,” an online statement reads, “is to ‘sell’ our lighting products so that we may ‘tell’ everyone we can about God’s soul-saving, life transforming gospel message…”
Perfectly legal, says Patrick Holman, an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “The Commission has no problem with a corporation having religious values,” he says.
But Holman does have a problem with a corporation using religious values to make hiring decisions.
Holman and the EEOC are representing an Oklahoma man, Edward Wolfe, who says he was denied a job at Voss because he wasn’t Christian enough.
“It’s unique,” Holman says. “I haven’t seen anything like it since I’ve been here.”
Wolfe says he applied for a job as Operations Supervisor at Voss’s Tulsa, Oklahoma store.
In the complaint filed against Voss by the EEOC, Wolfe says he saw the position on a church website. His first interview went well, but in a second interview with the branch manager, he told lawyers, he was questioned about his religious practices and beliefs.
According to the complaint, the manager asked Wolfe “to identify every church he has attended over the past several years; where and when [he] was ‘saved’ and the circumstances that led up to it.”
In the interview, Wolfe claims he was told most employees at Voss were Southern Baptist, but employees could go to any church, as long as they were “born again.”
The complaint claims the manager asked Wolfe if he would “have a problem” coming to work early, without pay, to attend Bible study.
Wolfe, a single parent who says he cannot attend church on Sundays, told lawyers the branch manager was
“agitated” at his answers.He didn’t get the job.
A young Christian (former) fundamentalist writes about what he believed.
Gay marriage is about fundraising for the right wing, just as “that scary black president wants to take away your guns” is. They are rather blatant hypocrites, if you cared to look closely and critically. But many people of faith take everything… on faith!
If I was placing an infant in an adoptive family, would I choose my warm, loving, self-deprecating gay brother and his kind, thoughtful partner — or the Romneys? Geeze, I wouldn’t even hesitate a minute! There’s no way in hell I’d place a poor, defenseless child with a shallow, rigid and money-hungry man who’s the epitome of white male privilege, and his pampered wife who’s subordinate to a judgmental, patriarchal belief system. I mean, duh.
What if Mittens had adopted Glee’s Rachel Berry instead of her two gay dads? Unthinkable.
Apparently Mittens still thinks being straight is inherently enough to make you a superior parent:
Mitt Romney made a speech via satellite at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Saturday morning in which he reiterated his view that children are better off growing up with hetereosexual parents.
“We need to strengthen the commitment that exists in this country to family. I hope to be able to talk to young people and tell them how important it is to get married before they have children because the opportunity for a mom and a dad to help guide the life of a child gives them such an enormous advantage in their lives going forward,” Mr. Romney said.
The Politicker reached out to the Romney campaign to see whether they felt a child could equally benefit from the guidance provided by a gay couple. Ryan Williams, a spokesman for Mr. Romney, said it is the candidate’s long held belief children are better off with straight parents.
“This is what he’s been saying forever,” Mr. Williams said. “He’s always said that the ideal setting to raise a child is with the mom and the dad.”Though Mr. Romney believes states should be allowed to give gay couples the right to adopt children, he has said in multiple interviews that he believes a heterosexual marriage is the“ideal setting” for children to grow up in. He opposes granting either marriages or civil unions to gay couples.
This really says it all, doesn’t it?
“A female solider in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by military fire,” declared a piece on rape in the US military in the Guardian last December. As if the details of ensuing isolation, lack of psychological support and risk of homelessness weren’t enough, one travesty was left out: unless life is at risk, military medical insurance does not fund abortion for women who are left pregnant after such attacks. Period.
Even if a woman can afford to pay for her own termination, military hospitals are currently outlawed from performing the procedure. The March Act, proposed by senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Barbara Boxer, Jeanne Shaheen, Patty Murray and Frank Lautenberg, seeks to change that. Endorsed by the Department of Defence, and given its appeal to patriotism as much as its pinpointing of this grievous human rights violation, can this be the law to finally persuade America’s anti-choicers of the compassionate abortion argument? Or will it merely be the exception that proves the rule?
Much of the current legislative restriction on civilian abortion in the US relates to the 1976 Hyde amendment, which declared that federal funding should not cover abortion (initially relating to services offered by the low-income healthcare provider Medicaid), except in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother was at risk. Its relevance was alarmingly renewed in March 2010 when Barack Obama signed an executive order reiterating that protection of federal funds to save the $940bn healthcare bill.
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